Political Education In The Anthropocene

This book articulates an educational theory as well as a political theory of the Anthropocene. Divided into three sections it addresses educational anthropology, cultures and institutions, and educational recommendations in the Anthropocene. Topics covered in the volume measure the impact of the idea of the Anthropocene on the type of anthropology that underlies education and on a phenomenology of relationship. It links the notion of the Anthropocene with cultures and institutions so as not to 'smooth out' or erase the latter. Finally, it presents proposals and recommendations for educational practices. The work advocates rethinking education as an essential component in ensuring the sustainability of human life in society - by proposing to go beyond the approach of education for sustainable development or environmental education. The work also brings together empirical contributions in which proposals are elaborated for programs, pedagogical devices and experiments relating to the preparation of the future in the field of education. This volume is of interest to researchers of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene has become central to understanding the intimate connections between human life and the natural environment, but it has fractured our sense of time and possibility. What implications does that fracturing have for how we should think about politics in these new times? In this cutting-edge intervention, Duncan Kelly considers how this new geological era could shape our future by engaging with the recent past of our political thinking. If politics remains a short-term affair governed by electoral cycles, could an Anthropocenic sense of time, value and prosperity be built into it, altering long-established views about abundance, energy and growth? Is the Anthropocene so disruptive that it is no more than a harbinger of ecological doom, or can modern politics adapt by rethinking older debates about states, territories, and populations? Kelly rejects both pessimistic fatalism about humanity’s demise, and an optimistic fatalism that makes the Anthropocene into a problem too big for politics, best left to the market or technology to solve. His skilful defence of the potential for democratic politics to negotiate this challenge is an indispensable guide to the ideas that matter most to understanding this epochal transformation.

This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability. Referring to the uncertainty of the time in which we live and teach, the term Anthropocene is used to acknowledge anthropogenic contributions to the climate crisis and to consider and reflect on the emotional responses to adverse climate events. The text begins with the editors’ discussion of this contested term and then moves on to make the case that we must decentre anthropocentric models in teacher education praxis. The four thematic parts include chapters on the challenges to teacher education practice and praxis, affective dimensions of teaching in the face of the global crisis, relational pedagogies in the Anthropocene, and ways to ignite the empathic imaginations of tomorrow’s teachers. Together the authors discuss new theoretical eco-orientations and describe innovative pedagogies that create opportunities for students and teachers to live in greater harmony with the more-than-human world. This incredibly timely volume will be essential to pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators. FEATURES: - Offers critical reflections on anthropocentrism from multiple perspectives in education, including continuing education, educational organization, K–12, post-secondary, and more - Includes accounts that not only deconstruct the disavowal of the climate crisis in schools but also articulate an ecosophical approach to education - Features discussion prompts in each chapter to enhance student engagement with the material

The Politics of the Anthropocene is a sophisticated yet accessible treatment of how human institutions, practices, and principles need to be re-thought in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth system and its life-support capacities. However, the world remains stuck with practices and modes of thinking that were developed in the Holocene - the epoch of around 12,000 years of unusual stability in the Earth system, toward the end of which modern institutions such as states and capitalist markets arose. These institutions persist despite their potentially catastrophic failure to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene, foremost among them a rapidly changing climate and accelerating biodiversity loss. The pathological trajectories of these institutions need to be disrupted by advancing ecological reflexivity: the capacity of structures, systems, and sets of ideas to question their own core commitments, and if necessary change themselves, while listening and responding effectively to signals from the Earth system. This book envisages a world in which humans are no longer estranged from the Earth system but engage with it in a more productive relationship. We can still pursue democracy, social justice, and sustainability - but not as before. In future, all politics should be first and foremost a politics of the Anthropocene. The arguments are developed in the context of issues such as climate change, biodiversity, and global efforts to address sustainability.

Featuring an international, multidisciplinary set of contributors, this thought-provoking book reimagines established narratives of the Anthropocene to allow differences in regions and contexts to be taken seriously, emphasising the importance of localised and situated knowledge. It offers critical engagement with the debates around the Anthropocene by challenging the dominant techno-rational agenda that often prevails in socio-political and academic discussions.

This volume, which is rooted in biogeophysical studies, addresses conceptions of political action in the Anthropocene and the tension between a desire to accomplish the Promethean project of modernity and a post-Promethean approach. This work explores the idea of ​​an anthropological mutation of political consolidation from a “post-Promethean togetherness”, to creating the capacity to act together. The political thinking of the human condition developed by Hannah Arendt is important here as a resource for thinking about humanity in terms of human adventure. This has three dimensions: hubris, the world and coexistence referring respectively to the logic of profit of the homo oeconomicus, the logic of responsibility of the homo collectivus and the logic of the hospitality of the homo religatus. The intellectual and political attitude outlined in this book is an extension of critical theory: the work also puts forward a critique of what poses a problem in our relationship to the world and suggests how to overcome it, the ultimate goal being social transformation. The author propose an uprising and an anthropological consolidation of politics based on the revitalization that is brought about by the sharing of a conviviality both between humans and with what is non-human. The identification of conviviality as an educational paradigm to survive the Anthropocene gives us the much needed reason for hope despite this heritage of the Anthropocene. In addition to Arendtian thinking, this critical theory for the Anthropocene draws on the political thinking of several contemporary authors including Maurice Bellet, Hartmut Rosa, Andreas Weber, Dominique Bourg, and Christian Arnsperger. This volume is of interest to researchers in the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene has become an environmental buzzword. It denotes a new geological epoch that is human‐dominated. As mounting scientific evidence reveals, humankind has fundamentally altered atmospheric, geological, hydrological, biospheric, and other Earth system processes to an extent that the risk of an irreversible system change emerges. Human societies must therefore change direction and navigate away from critical tipping points in the various ecosystems of our planet. This hypothesis has kicked off a debate not only on the geoscientific definition of the Anthropocene era, but increasingly also in the social sciences. However, the specific contribution of the social sciences disciplines and in particular that of political science still needs to be fully established. This edited volume analyzes, from a political science perspective, the wider social dynamics underlying the ecological and geological changes, as well as their implications for governance and politics in the Anthropocene. The focus is on two questions: (1) What is the contribution of political science to the Anthropocene debate, e.g. in terms of identified problems, answers, and solutions? (2) What are the conceptual and practical implications of the Anthropocene debate for the discipline of political science? Overall, this book contributes to the Anthropocene debate by providing novel theoretical and conceptual accounts of the Anthropocene, engaging with contemporary politics and policy-making in the Anthropocene, and offering a critical reflection on the Anthropocene debate as such. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, global environmental politics and governance, and sustainable development.

Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments. Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.